52 second inspection, the inspectors were giving the Iraqis between six and twelve hours' notice before each site visit. This was the rule laid down by I.A.E.A. headquarters in Vienna. The Iraqis understood the rule far too well; they were moving equipment from one site to another during the notice period. In June, as American satellites watched, the Iraqis went to hiding places in the desert, dug up giant machines for pro- cessing uranium, loaded them on trucks, and drove them to a site called Abu Gharib, to which the inspectors had been denied entry. Then the satellites saw the trucks move the equipment from Abu Gharib to a second site, at A1 Fallujah. David Kay, the American who led the team, says that he got this informa- tion in Iraq at about 3 A.M. He then called together six inspectors "for a long walk in Baghdad," during which they could talk without being bugged. They agreed to do a zero-notice in- spection at AI Fallujah that Y morning, despite the policy of giving six to twelve hours' no- tIce. Kay told the Iraqis that he was going "in the direction of' a site the team had already toured-a site that happened to be on the road to Al Fallujah. Kay managed to get his vehicle in front of the col- umn and went fight by the first site. The Iraqis "went " K " Th crazy, ay says. ey turned on red lights, pulled us over, and argued Wlth us, but we got to Fallujah anyway." There they were denied entry, but they managed to photo- graph trucks leaving through another gate, while the Iraqis fired bullets over their heads. The moment was dramatic: the in- spectors had the first clear proof that Saddam was trying to make a bomb. The equipment included huge seventeen- foot magnets, weighing more than fifty tons, which could be used only for en- riching uranium-raising it from its natural state to nuclear-weapon grade. Kay saw it as a vindication of the team. 'We all pulled together and it worked," he said. "Even though we had to break LA.E.A. rules to do it." The I.A.E.A. then sprang into ac- tion. It and the Special Commission rushed to Iraq a high-level delegation that included Mohamed El Baradei, an Egyptian on the I.A.E.A legal staff The delegation found the Iraqis arguing lamely that the equipment had nothing to do with uranium enrichment. El Baradei, fresh on the scene, embodied the tradition of the I.A.E.A. Before an incredulous group of inspectors, he de- clared, as Kay recalls it, "The Iraqis do not have a uranium-enrichment program. I know so, because they are my friends and they have told me that they don't." El Baradei was wrong, of course. But he was following the line laid down by his I.A.E.A. superiors. If they had had their way, Kay's inspection might never have occurred. After the first inspection, in May, Iraq had accounted for all the imported nuclear material it had previ- ouslv informed the I.A.E.A. about, 01 which balanced the agency's accounts. "The I.A.E.A. was lucky," a former inspector who was on the first team says. Kay and this inspector say that Zifferero and his boss, Hans Blix, the director-general of the I.A.E.A., wanted to put out a report at the end of May concluding that everything was fine. But a minority of in- spectors, mostly Americans, wouldn't go along. They couldn't understand why the Iraqis had left some of the bombed buildings untouched while razing others, even tear- ing out foundations as far as several metres down. The Americans thought that the Iraqis might be concealing nuclear-weapon work, and they wanted the report to say so. "It all looked very suspicious," the in- spector said. "But the I.A.E.A. wasn't interested. It wanted to pasteurize our language and put the report out any- way." The I.A.E.A. was saved from hu- miliation by a defector, who turned up just before the report was to be released and told Western intelligence about the equipment. A few weeks later, Kay suc- ceeded in finding and photographing it. Kay also led the only other team that produced major intelligence leads. After arriving in Baghdad late in the afternoon on September 22, 1991, the team set out early the next morning. Kay pointed toward the A1 Rashid Hotel, and told the Iraqis simply to "drive that way." By . 6 A.M., the team was searching a nine- THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1,1993 story building in Baghdad from the top down. It turned out to be where the Iraqis were designing facilities for their first atomic bomb. When they reached the base- ment, a few hours later, the team found trunkfuls of classified documents from the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission. This discovery sparked an intense confrontation. The Iraqis kept the team in the parking lot until 7 P.M., confis- cated the documents until 2 A.M. the next day, and then gave only some of them back. What the Iraqis didn't know was that the inspectors had spirited out two reports marked "Top Secret." These crucial papers contained the bomb de- sign. The design was crude but workable, and would have produced a weapon with nearly twice the power of the Hiroshima bomb. E ARLY on the morning of Septem- ber 24th, Kay's team began a search of two other buildings, using the same tactics. These buildings turned out to be the headquarters of the entire Iraqi A-bomb program, code-named Petro- chemical3. The team turned up person- nel lists and procurement records, and four hours later there was another con- frontation. The Iraqis demanded that the team surrender its records, its photo- graphs, and its videotapes. When the in- spectors refused, the Iraqis held them at the site. This was the celebrated "parking- lot incident"-a four-day standoff in the scorching Baghdad heat. The team lived near its immobilized bus until the Iraqis finally backed down. Eventually, the team hauled out pay records, computer files, and more than sixty thousand pages of documents, in- cluding the two top-secret reports on bomb design. The reports were a gold mine of intelligence nuggets: they re- vealed numerous aspects of Saddam's bomb-manufacturing effort and still constitute the primary evidence of how close he was to the bomb when the war broke out. The aggressive tactics required for this breakthrough did not please the I.A.E.A. Zifferero who was not in Iraq at the time of that inspection, later told an inspector who was there that the epi- sode was "one of the worst things that ever happened." And, according to Kay, Hans Blix reacted by saying that Kay was not going to be assigned to any more inspections in Iraq. Kay then re-